ex-lion tamer

kalilily and i have agreed to collaborate on some creative ritual/spell-making.

i was actually first inspired to do this by my wife, who, to keep a long story short, knows something about this stuff professionally. we created a shrine for a couple of friends of ours who were trying and failing to get pregnant; it included an amulet containing various herbs from the garden, three west african fertility gods, a wire sculpture of a baby carriage, some flowers, and a picture of the couple. very soon after, we learned they were having twins!

now we have decided we need to do some creative ritual in the interests of opening up our harried, stress-filled and somewhat impoverished lives to some shift in energy so that (1) my wife can be freed to spend more time with our daughter and less time working, and (2) i can spend more time making music, which is who i “really am” if that means anything.

kalilily begins with these instructions:

First of all, email me some words that represent what is important for you to have in your future. Then, gather some small objects that have deep meaning for you and the members of your family in terms of what gives you all your strength, your persistence, your creativity, your dreams. They could be faces from photos, pieces of fabric — small objects that I will have you attach to whatever I make. Meanwhile, find a cardboard box, the size of a shoe box. Spend some time decorating it however you want — kids love to glue stuff onto things. You can make it sparkling or somber, any color you want. Let me know when you are done with the box.

I will begin on my end when I get your stream of consciousness bunch of words. Don’t think too much about them — just let them pour out into the email.

This is going to be as therapeutic for me as I hope it will be for you.

she also had the bright idea of blogging this process. well, here we go!

as my kaos-magickian friends like to tell me, the practice of magick does not require “belief” in anything - merely intention and will. it’s perfectly reasonable, for example, to be a dialectically materialist skeptic who eschews all superstition, and still partake of intentional ritual as a psychological exercise. i’m not much of a materialist, however. i always have had the feeling that we are all a part of something larger, and furthermore that we are all larger than we think we are.

i’ll let you know if anything happens.